"You have seen the results of his whip. I still tried to fight, but I was half-dead, so he was able to subdue me with little effort." Weldon had also enjoyed the blood. Whenever Michael grew a little stronger, Weldon would use the whip again. Eventually, Michael stopped fighting. "I'm not sure how long he kept me there. A couple of months, I think. I lost track of time."
As Sara walked up behind her husband, she saw that he was sweating, his white shirt clinging to his back in patches. She ached for him, for the terrified ten-year-old child he had been, and for the man who still carried mental and physical scars that would never disappear. Wanting to comfort him, she laid a: gentle hand on his arm.
Lost in the past, her husband whirled around and almost hit her, his eyes jungle wild and his fists clenched. Barely in time he checked himself from striking.
For an endless moment they stared at each other. Sara began to tremble, for his furious near-violence explained more about what Weldon had done to him than words could ever have conveyed. Her mouth dry, she asked, "How did you escape him?"
"I didn't," Mikahl said bitterly. "Eventually Weldon decided it was time to continue his travels. Having no further use for me, he gave me to the local pasha with the suggestion that I be castrated. He said he was doing me quite a favor, for eunuchs could become great men in the Ottoman empire."
"Dear God, how could any man do such things to a child?" Sara said, sickened by the knowledge that her husband might have been emasculated for a madman's whim. The passion and closeness they had shared, the blending of energies that joined and transcended them, might never have existed.
"Weldon delights in hurting children. As a parting gift, he carved his initial on my hip and rubbed lampblack in the wound. It pleased him that one letter could do double duty: M for master and W for Weldon. I cursed him, and believe me, an East End slum child who has spent two years at sea is an expert at profanity. I swore that someday I would find him, and make him pay for what he had done." A muscle jerked in his cheek. "He laughed at me. After he left Tripoli, I'm sure he put me and my threats out of his mind. I was just one small episode in a lifetime of evil."
"Yet against all the odds, you have achieved what you swore you would." Sara shuddered as she saw how viciously Weldon had perverted the truth when he had told her about her husband's past.
Indeed, Mikahl felt a special kind of hatred for Weldon, but it was not that of a lover scorned. It was the hatred of a fatherless boy who had wanted to love, and who had instead been savagely betrayed.
Mikahl was right: Weldon was truly evil. "How did you get from North Africa to Asia?"
"Rather than having me castrated locally, the pasha decided to present me to the sultan in Constantinople, along with several other boys." His mouth twisted. "It's those wonderful green eyes you're so fond of. They make me memorable. I would have been infinitely better off with blue or brown."
Sara flinched, feeling unreasonably guilty for having admired the intense, magnetic color.
"The ship reached Constantinople and moored for the night before unloading," he continued. "I was able to jump overboard and swim ashore. I had learned some Arabic and Turkish by then, as well as many Muslim customs, so I was able to pass as just another street child of uncertain ancestry. Fairly soon I had the luck to find work with a Persian merchant who had no children of his own. When he saw that I was interested, he taught me accounting and business. After he died, I became a trader myself along the old Silk Road across Turkestan. The rest you know."
"It's incredible that you survived, much less that you became the man you are." Sara shook her head, having trouble grasping the enormity of what her husband had endured, and how he had transcended it. "And after all these years, you have come to England to bring Charles Weldon to justice."
"Exactly. To make him suffer, and ultimately to kill him." His low voice vibrated with emotion. "Now do you understand why my vengeance is justified?"
"I can't condone your desire to take the law into your own hands, though I can certainly understand it." Sara closed her eyes, a spasm of pain going through her. "Weldon deserves to be punished for his crimes, but what you are doing goes beyond simple justice to torture and murder."
She had the cowardly wish that Ross had not told her what was happening. But now that she knew, she could not turn her back on that knowledge. Fearing that she might faint, she sat down in her wing chair again as she rubbed her temples. "I have no right to judge what you are doing to Weldon. But nothing—nothing—can justify hurting others as you pursue your revenge. That's wrong, Mikahl. No matter how much you have suffered, you have no right to hurt the innocent."